The Year 2000

I think it was karma that we moved to Florida. Here is a brief timeline:

March, 2000
Scott and I vacationed in Sarasota. We wanted to pick a place on what we thought was the quieter coast of Florida, and we of course heard about the spectactular beaches there as well. We settled in at the "Rolling Waves Cottages" on Longboat Key. We were struck by the beauty of the water, and especially its color! We were used to Long Island Sound, a veritable cesspool of the detritus of countless thousands of us who descended upon the beaches in Connecticut during the very short summer season....so the light teal-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico were more than inviting! We even engaged a real estate agent, Jana, and her assistant, Trey, to show us some of the homes for sale...
It soon became apparent that this was our destiny: A street named Honore Avenue (my middle name is Honoree)...the exit off the highway for the hospital was the same number as the exit off the highway for the hospital we worked at in Connecticut! (we're both nurses) Scott and I had long discussions about moving. He was more reluctant ("it's so hot, and it's a giant strip mall")...I didn't exactly disagree with that, but eventually he agreed that we needed to get away from the reality of the harsh winters in New England: we were both getting older, and some day we might get seriously hurt slipping on ice or being involved in an accident...But coming to this conclusion took long and anxious discussions between us...we were leaving the home we had known for 17 years, and the one where we raised our kids.....it wasn't a slam dunk for me, believe it or not....

April 1, 2000
After making the momentous decision that would change our lives (they needed a little changing: we were in a rut!) we invited a real estate agent to look at our house. After a little discussion back and forth, we decided to list it at 150,000 dollars, which for then we felt was fair for our tiny rural Connecticut home (with about an acre of land). But we held off listing it because our son, Todd, was getting married July 1 that year. So we waited until May.

May 15, 2000
We listed our house for 150,000 dollars.

May 21, 2000
We sold our house for more or less the asking price (we negotiated a bit because our septic tank needed an overhaul). The buyers were ok with the closing date of July 28th...

June 26th, 2000
We flew to Florida for a long weekend. This time, Jana gives us her assistant, Trey, to show us houses. All day Saturday she showed us homes in Sarasota. We couldn't hide our disappointment as we told her we really didn't see anything that struck us as our perfect home. We thought we'd have to settle for a home we liked, but didn't feel any kinship to....no Feng Shui? The next morning, Trey said, "What about Bradenton? There are some homes there that I think you will like, and it's a little cheaper..." We agreed, and were shown several homes that could only be called disasters...it's funny, when you look at other people's houses, you're always thinking to yourself, how can people live like that! Until Trey said, "OK I think this is the house you are going to buy." We arrived in the driveway of this pretty home on a corner lot. So far so good. The inside was immaculate. OK imagining is good... It had a little room off the living room that would be perfect for an office. It had a swimming pool (one of our must-haves!)...but what sold us the house? Trey took us out by the swimming pool to an additional door, and Scott just exuded excitement as he saw an additional garage, equipped with running water, perfect for his train layout....he wanted to somehow have a "Train Room" and here it was! We couldn't believe it! He wouldn't have to use one of the bedrooms in the house!!! Oh, and it had a fenced yard, perfect for our black lab!!! So we agreed on a price by the end of the day ( a little more than we sold our house for, but it was almost twice as big!) Scott and I were privately amused at the back yards in Florida. So tiny! But the neighborhood was perfect, and it wasn't too far away from where we would be working (We got jobs at Sarasota Memorial Hospital)..PERFECT!

July 1st, 2000
We joyously celebrated Todd's wedding in Waterbury, Connecticut. What a beautiful day it was, blue sky, warm temperatures...everything went without a hitch! How often does THAT happen for a wedding!

July 26th, 2000
Moving day! The Atlas guys brought this HUGE truck down our little cul-de-sac street, backing it all the way until it rested along our split-rail fence...the guy who was in charge was what you'd picture a moving guy to be: Huge, too, with legs the size of tree trunks! The entire contents of our household were squished into a very small part of the truck (I was told that we were the third household!)...it's just amazing how they pile things on top of each other to accomplish it in the fastest, most efficient way. Everything that left the house had a yellow sticker on it. (We were finding them for years afterwards!) It took the better part of the day, and around 4:30 they were finished. Our precious possessions were on their way to Florida! We would soon be, too! Our friends graciously agreed to put us up until we could start our adventure!

July 28th, 2000
We closed on our home in Connecticut. We stayed at our friends' home that night with our dog, two cats, and our U-Haul trailer behind Scott's pickup.

July 29th, 2000
6 AM Saturday morning: We embark on our driving adventure to Florida, armed with walkie-talkies so that we could speak to one another (talking on the cell phones was too inconvenient)...waving goodbye to our sleepy friends as we drove away from their home... I had the dog in the back seat, and he had the two cats...MEOW!!!! (that's all they did all the way down!) We stopped in Richmond, Virginia, the first night and Savannah, Georgia the second night...it was great fun doing that!

July 31, 2000
We made it to Florida! We had to stay in a hotel (I must talk to AAA about THIS three-star rating! Couldn't it have been in a better neighborhood??) We found a nice kennel for our dog and cats which was less than a mile from the new house. After many emails and faxes in Connecticut, we were finally ready for our closing!

August 2nd, 2000
Our closing in Sarasota. It was memorable because the woman of the couple who owned the house had a service dog who just ran around willy-nilly while we signed our life away, and promised to pay some exhorbitant price after 30 years!!! She gave me a lot of tips typewritten on a couple of pages, about who the neighbors were, who you would get for pest control (I hadn't thought of THAT!), where you could order pizza, who built the pool, who painted the house, all the manuals for the appliances, and even the fact that there was a sex offender in the neighborhood! Plus a lot of other little tips... For goodness sakes that was more than necessary!!! But it was nice of her to do that for us...we appreciated every tip that came our way! Unfortunately the movers hadn't quite arrived from Connecticut with our stuff, so we shuffled back to the hotel to await our possessions. As it turned out, we had to stay there a bit longer than we wanted, because our stuff didn't come until August 8th!!

August 8th, 2000
Our stuff is finally here! Scott got a call from the moving guy on his cell phone, that they were on I-75, the major north-south interstate on the west coast...we arrived at the new house and pretty soon, we heard an engine that couldn't have belonged to anything but a HUGE truck, and sure enough there it came, looming around the corner, and parked in front of our driveway. (It was so long it almost encroached upon the neighbor's driveway!) Once all our possessions were distributed expertly by these guys, and they were paid for their trouble (holy mackerel, what a job they have!) we were in our new home at last! The first thing we noticed? Our living room, or great room as they called it here, had 10 foot ceilings, so our TV and the furniture it sat on were dwarfed by the size of the room! We had some money left over from the sale, so we thought we'd better fix that. Other stuff could wait.
Oh what we thought was incredible, was the neighbors! They all turned out en masse for this event, because it was a huge deal to see a truck that size, and they wanted to welcome us, and immediately invited us to go out to dinner the following day...AND, they mowed our lawn for us!
Because Florida has a sizeable population of...er....seniors, shall we say? They wanted to go out to eat at 4:00!!! Scott and I didn't dare look at each other as we accepted their invitation.
We settled into our new home full of anticipation...we were living in a totally different environment than the one we had just left. We didn't know a soul. Life was less hectic here...and it was hot! I was in heaven. Scott? Not so much....